This year's Leadership Forum focused on the major forces driving retail disruption, and featured a series of sessions designed to spark thinking and creativity as it pertains to the retail model of 2017 and beyond. Together, top U.S. retail executives engaged in frank dialogue about the state of the industry, guided by thought-leaders from retail, consumer brands, finance, innovation, and public policy arenas.

In the opening session, Accenture's Jill Standish and Mark Curtis spoke about what makes a retail company successful in 2017 and specifically, the importance of people to a sustainable business transformation. In what they call Living Businesses, people and design – not just technology – are key to enabling success.

Best Buy Chairman and CEO Hubert Joly headlined the conference with insights from the company's

successful transformation, including what he's learned as the journey continues.

With startups undoubtedly playing a role in the transformation of the old retail model, Todd Lutwak, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, led a discussion about how startups and traditional brands can engage with each other to advance the industry together.

Kicking off the public policy focus of the conference, Jennifer Safavian, RILA's executive vice president, government affairs, spoke on the opportunity retailers now have to position themselves with policy makers around the issues impacting the industry the most, especially the proposed border adjustable tax. Safavian was followed by a policy and politics panel featuring Fox News Sunday Anchor Chris Wallace, former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, and former Governor of Pennsylvania and NBC News Analyst Ed Rendell.